Reaching for the Stars

It is always a thrill to discover a new writer. The older you get, the keener the pleasure, tinged with surprise and regret as you wonder why on earth you haven’t come across this author before. How much greater the delight when the discovery comes out of nowhere and when the writer turns out to be good, verging on great – a qualification we will return to later.

We’re talking about the late James Salter, the American writer of whom the Washington Post once opined: ‘Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers . . . He can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.’ That reference to his audience as ‘other writers’ is particularly revealing. It reminds me of Norman Lewis, who was often referred to as ‘a writer’s writer’, an accolade that manages somehow to be both elevating and deflating. I started my Salter sojourn with The Hunters (1957) and, looking back on it, I think this is as good a place as any. It was his first book, published when he was in his early thirties. A jet fighter pilot in the Korean War with a hundred sorties to his name, Salter fashioned his first-hand experience into a novel so accomplished that it instantly lifted him into the realm of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry as one of the great writers about men and flight. In a little more than 200 pages, his debut also signalled the arrival of a prose stylist whose sentences stun again and again. The Italian writer and politician Luigi Barzini once likened reading Norman Lewis to ‘eating cherries’. Reading Salter is like gorging on dark chocolate. In The Hunters, Captain Cleve Connell, Salter’s protagonist, is obsessed with becoming an ace, one of a select group of pilots who have shot down five enemy MiGs. These young men are the focus of praise, excitement and envy, in addition to proving irresistible to touring actresses. Aces are everything. Without five kills to your name, ‘you were only one of the loose group in the foreground of which the triumvirate [of aces] gleamed. If you did not have MiGs, you were nothing.’ This is a setting of fierce rivalry tipping into deadly competition – in 2025 you can almost hear the distant cries of ‘toxic masculinity’. But it is also a world of writing that dazzles as brightly as the aircraft moving across the sun, high above the Yalu River separating China from Korea.

Flashing like fish silver, they broke through a low, billowing surf of clouds and into unmarked sky. They climbed. They crossed the Han and into enemy territory, passing the invisible line beyond which little was forgiven. Time seemed to be going quickly. The tempo of landmarks was greater than usual. The compounding hands of the altimeter seemed to be moving more rapidly. Over the radio, nothing except for routine traffic. The fight had not started. Cleve felt elated. He had not hoped for such luck

The sky is the theatre for individual valour, and glory is there for the taking. Like Cleve Connell, Salter wanted greatness. After leaving the Air Force a year after the publication of The Hunters, and $60,000 richer having sold the film rights (Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner would star in the big-screen adaptation), he figured writing novels was the finest way to achieve it. ‘I wanted to be greatly admired, but unknown,’ he said of The Hunters two years before his death in 2015. Perversely he succeeded, becoming that rare breed, a writer who was hugely admired in limited quarters but who never achieved the fame enjoyed by his contemporaries Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. As a pilot, Salter – he was then James Horowitz, before he changed his name – was presumably good, though not, according to the pilots’ standards, great. Like Connell, he had one MiG to his name. Women, when they appear in The Hunters, are the hunted. This is war, and in Salter’s telling it is virtually an all-male world. The women’s role is to provide male pilots with sexual relief from the stress and rigours of conflict. If this sounds understandably unappealing to half the readers out there, hang on. After The Hunters had appeared, Salter left the intensely masculine milieu of the Air Force and his repertoire widened. Sexual life, what he referred to in an interview in his eighties as ‘the real game of the grown-up world’, remained a passionate interest to be explored both in his writing and in real life. He was an extremely good-looking man. Sex moves from the sidelines to centre-stage in A Sport and a Pastime, which appeared exactly a decade after Salter’s first book. Even at the height of the sexual revolution, however, he struggled to find a publisher for this unabashedly erotic novel. Initially at least, and extraordinarily given what followed, it found few readers – fewer than 3,000. Its afterlife has been vastly more successful, to the point where it is rightly considered one of his finest works. Based on a high-voltage affair he had in the 1960s, this is Gatsby on Viagra. An unnamed, voyeuristic narrator tells the story of Phillip Dean, an entitled American dropout from Yale, and his 18-year-old French shopgirl lover Anne-Marie Costallot. Their geographical tour around France in a raffish 1952 Delage convertible is, in parallel, a physical tour of each other’s bodies as they throw themselves into the ‘satanic happiness’ of sexual experimentation. There is lust and longing and, as the days pass, suggestions of love on Anne-Marie’s side, though disappointment and betrayal hover ominously in the background. The narrator, Salter’s foil to Dean in the spirit of Nick Carraway to Gatsby, stands in monochrome contrast to the man he describes, another Salter man of action whom he loves and loathes. While the storyteller observes from the margins, Dean plunges in. The narrator hankers after Anne-Marie, Dean has her – again and again, in hotel beds across the country, in passages of supercharged sensuality. But who is Dean, really? We can never know, because, as the conflicted narrator confesses, he is ‘not telling the truth about him’. Dean is an oversized character created ‘out of my own inadequacies’. This simmering tension between the narrator and Dean lends further depth to A Sport and a Pastime, taking it beyond the realm of doomed love affair into something more complicated and troubling, a study of storytelling and a dissection of human relationships. Both Anne-Marie and Dean are complicit in their experiment. Neither is an innocent, neither is wholly in control, but the advantage, if there is one, lies with the gilded American. He is a stranger in France, who has come to see what he can take for himself and who, we start to feel, might disappear as swiftly as he arrived in his borrowed sports car. He may be penniless in France, but there is a rich father to fall back on. Anne-Marie has no such safety net. The lovers give themselves to each other generously but are both capable of selfish abandon. We can only understand the nature of their relationship through the lens of a narrator who is compromised by his version of events. The all-consuming affair is cruel, tender, liberating, shaming, joyful and depraved. It is based on lies and fantasy but is as real as life itself. Salter’s fascination with human relationships, their delusions and vulnerabilities, was explored in devastating depth in Light Years, published in 1975, the year of his divorce from his first wife Ann. Here his investigation takes the much longer view, leaving the short-lived encounters of callow youth to chronicle the slow disintegration, over several decades, of an apparently ideal marriage. Nedra and Viri Berland lead the good life. He is an ambitious architect who commutes to Manhattan from their large, handsome home near the Hudson, complete with spreading lawn and river view. She is the beautiful mother of his children, a homemaker who lunches, shops and maintains all the appearances of an enviable existence. They host candlelit dinner parties with eclectic, intelligent friends which stretch into the early hours. They skate on frozen rivers, sunbathe on the beach and play happy games with their two daughters. The house is a monument to their marriage. It is glorious on the surface, yet decaying from within, extravagant but still dissolving, like the garden gravel path, into ruts. Salter captures this ambivalence and exposes it with a keen blade.

This gentle hour, this comfortable room, this death. For everything, in fact, every plate and object, utensil, bowl illustrated what did not exist; they were fragments borne forward from the past, shards of a vanished whole.

The stylist is at the peak of his powers in these heartbreaking pages. The marriage stutters, lovers fill the gaps.

In the evening at the hour when, across small gardens, one can see people gathered in lighted rooms, she lies, her legs each pointing to a corner of the bed, her arms spread wide. From the street comes the faint sound of horns. Her eyes are closed; she is caught like a marvellous beast. Her moans, her cries excite him beyond anything. It takes a long time. Afterwards she lies naked, unmoving. She kisses his fingers. They are bathed in silence, in the long, swimming afterdream. She knows quite well – she is absolutely convinced – these are her last days. She will never find them again.

Although they appear to have everything, Viri comes to see that he has nothing. None of this is enough. Fame is his consuming ambition. ‘Fame was not only part of greatness, it was more. It was the evidence, the only proof. All the rest was nothing, in vain. He who is famous cannot fail; he has already succeeded.’ Like Connell in The Hunters, like Rand, the glory-hunting mountain climber in Solo Faces (1979), like Salter himself, Viri requires public approbation. And in its absence he shrivels into failure.

The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life – it was not worth much – not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith.

So a good writer? That doesn’t come close. Great? Perhaps Salter’s oeuvre is, like a number of his half dozen novels and many more short stories, too slim to qualify. There was a burst of literary production in his later years, of which his memoir Burning the Days (1997) – to be explored in a second article – and the novel All that Is (2013) stand out. But these distinctions, as the troubled protagonists of his fiction find to their cost, hardly matter. To read Salter is to experience the deep thrum of human existence in all its pleasure and pain. He is that rare thing, a writer who makes your heart ache and your soul sing.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Justin Marozzi 2025